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Testing Presidential Waters as Race at Home Heats Up

CULPEPER, Va., March 21 - George Allen makes little secret that he is bored with life in the Senate.

"I made more decisions in half a day as governor than you can make in a whole week in the Senate," Senator Allen said earlier this month as he dashed into a recent Republican fund-raiser in Cedar Falls, Iowa. Over eggs and hash browns with a Republican crowd in Davenport, he lamented about being in the Senate, "It's too slow for me."

Senator Allen, Republican of Virginia, had traveled to Iowa with designs on the White House in 2008, so his musings on his job's duties may not sound surprising. With his conservative voting record and down-home folksy manner -- he wears black lizard-skin cowboy boots and tucks a tin of chewing tobacco in his suit pocket -- and his name recognition as the son of a famous football coach, he has been crisscrossing the country, pitching himself as an alternative to Senator John McCain.

But the senator from Virginia may be getting ahead of himself. Even as he laments his day job, he is dancing a delicate two-step, asking Virginians to return him to it. Here in Culpeper, far away from the presidential proving ground of Iowa, he sounded a different theme, that of the grateful public servant: "Thank you for allowing me to serve you all."

In a year that is looking up for Democrats, Mr. Allen's re-election bid just got tougher than he expected. Mark Warner, the Democratic former governor of Virginia, decided against a challenge, but James Webb, a Navy secretary under President Ronald Reagan, Mr. Allen's political idol, recently jumped into the Democratic primary, turning a ho-hum race into one to watch.

So Mr. Allen could be found Tuesday night in Culpeper, a farming community in north-central Virginia, politicking retail-style. A friendly audience listened politely as he called for tough new border laws and fiscal responsibility. But the first questioner, a real estate agent and longtime Republican voter named Gardiner Mulford, hinted at trouble ahead.

"The words kind of ring hollow with me," Mr. Mulford said, after pointedly reminding the senator that Republicans ran Washington. He said later that he would not vote for Mr. Allen, or any Republican, "until the party corrects itself."

The senator did not offer much defense. "Some of your concerns I do share," he told Mr. Mulford.

Mr. Allen did not plan to stay in Virginia for long, with an itinerary that also included Texas, South Carolina and New Hampshire. He ducked awkward questions about the future and whether he would finish a second Senate term.

"My father was a football coach," Mr. Allen said in Iowa, "and he said the future is now."

Football is an essential part of Mr. Allen's persona; his father, and namesake, coached the Los Angeles Rams and Washington Redskins, and he played quarterback for the University of Virginia when it was on a notorious losing streak. In Allen-speak, a Republican primary is "an intrasquad scrimmage." A recent Republican presidential straw poll in Tennessee, in which Mr. Allen came in third behind Bill Frist, the Senate Republican leader, and Mitt Romney, the governor of Massachusetts, was "just a pickup game."

He also likes to toss a football at political events. In Cedar Falls, one poor soul took a nosedive into a cluttered dinner tray trying to corral one of the senator's passes.

"He seems like a good old boy backwoods Republican," said Bobby Kaufmann, president of the Iowa College Republicans. "Real down-to-earth, and he really seems to believe his conservative principles."

That is certainly the image Mr. Allen wants to project. He calls himself "a common-sense Jeffersonian conservative," which loosely translates into the Reagan credo of getting government off people's backs. "I trust free people and free enterprise," he says. "I don't like meddling, nanny or oppressive government."

Fiscal conservatives seem to like him, but social conservatives are uneasy. "He's got a good voting record," said Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council, "but the question is how committed is he."

Perhaps to demonstrate commitment, Mr. Allen recently became a co-sponsor of a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. He also opposes legislation classifying crimes against gay men and lesbians as hate crimes. When South Dakota passed a restrictive new abortion law, Mr. Allen said abortion should be left to the states -- a view tantamount to calling for Roe v. Wade to be overturned.

But if tacking right helps Mr. Allen nationally, it could hurt in Virginia. The senator's approval ratings were 51 percent in July 2005, according to a Mason-Dixon poll; since then, the climate for Republicans has worsened, and Virginia has just elected another Democratic governor.

"He's to the right of Virginia," said Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia who has known Mr. Allen since the senator was president of the graduating class there and Mr. Sabato ran the student council.

Even in Culpeper, a conservative bastion, gay issues came up when a pony-tailed 16-year-old named Tully Satre proclaimed himself "a gay Virginian" and confronted the senator, who said he did not want to turn homosexuality into a civil right.

The exchange was telling. Mr. Allen does not put much stock in political correctness. In talking about energy policy, he often denounces "the whims of some mullah in Iran." On welfare, he reminds voters how as Virginia's governor he required women to name the fathers of their children before getting payments. "It was amazing," he said, "how many recollections were refreshed."

Political analysts say Mr. Allen's likability is his biggest strength. Even Democrats say he passes the beer test, as in he seems like the kind of guy with whom one would want to drink beer. Stuart Rothenberg, the editor of a nonpartisan political newsletter, has said that if Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were put into a blender, you would come out with George Allen.

"Their strength is not their intellectual gravitas," Mr. Rothenberg said. "Their strength is their commitment to principles and their personal outlook on life and politics."

The senator relishes the Reagan comparison, but at a time when President Bush's poll numbers are in the tank, he hems and haws around the idea that he is like Mr. Bush. "I'm George Allen," he said. "I am who I am."

And Mr. Allen is coy about whether he wants to succeed Mr. Bush. "So, are you going to run?" one woman in Culpeper asked. The senator from Virginia leaned back on his cowboy boots, his face flushing slightly red.